Budget 2020: Nature jobs for out-of-work Kiwis in $ 1b environment spend?

Out-of-work Kiwis could soon find themselves helping boost New Zealand’s nature, amid a billion-dollar spend on the environment in today’s Budget.

It comes alongside more than $ 300m for pest control and management – and more than $ 430m on a package that would see unemployed people in the regions cleaning up rivers and helping restore wetlands.

The new jobs fund aims to create about 1800 roles to boost predator control efforts and planting, and improve waterways, tracks and huts.

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Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage said the Department of Conservation would work alongside councils, iwi and local businesses like tourism operators.

“As well as getting people back to work, this initiative will support household incomes, and promote mental health and wellbeing for the people involved.”

The roles would primarily be in the regions, and managed through agencies like the QEII Trust, Landcare Trust, regional councils and landowner groups.

“The workers will help protect and restore indigenous biodiversity and habitat, help with revegetation of private and public conservation land and undertake riparian planting,” she said.

“There is an opportunity in these regions for people who have lost their jobs in other sectors to move into this habitat work, and the four-year investment program will give businesses the certainty and confidence to invest and build their capacity and capability.”

More “green jobs” – potentially about 4000 – would be created with a separate $ 433m spend on regional environmental projects for the next five years.

Environment Minister David Parker said the program had been designed specifically in response to the impact of Covid-19.

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“This investment will contribute to improving the health of New Zealand’s waterways and support economic recovery in partnership with local government and farmers,” he said.

“It will include restoring mini wetlands, stabilizing river banks, removing sediment, and providing for fish passage.

“The funding will support employment across New Zealand, including the Kaipara catchment.”

Parker said the package allowed businesses considering redundancies and downscaling to redeploy their staff on environmentally focused activities in their home region.

“When those businesses are able to rehire again, workers can return to their previous roles.”

Another large chunk of the green spend would help beat back pests – and continue the country’s bid to be free of major pest predators by 2050.

The $ 315m package included $ 148m for DoC to ramp up pest control and eradication – specifically supporting the Predator Free New Zealand effort and working with iwi to stop the collapse of North Island forests.

Another $ 100m had been earmarked for jobs to curb the rampant spread of wilding pines, while $ 40m went toward Land Information NZ to undertake pest and weed control in rivers on Crown land, and $ 27m would help control ballooning populations of wallabies across the Bay of Plenty, Waikato, Canterbury and Otago.

Climate gets ‘loose change’ – Greenpeace

Greenpeace quietly applauded the Government’s green spending – but dismissed the Budget’s allocation for climate change as “loose change”.

“Looking at where money’s gone in the massive spend-up, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the climate crisis was no longer with us,” its executive director Russel Norman said.

Direct spending in climate change included more than $ 1b on allocating New Zealand emission units and covering the loss on sale of them; $ 154m for administering the Emissions Trading Scheme; nearly $ 20m for policy and support of domestic and international climate programs; and nearly $ 9m for the newly-formed Climate Change Commission.

“Unfortunately there’s only loose change from Grant Robertson’s pocket to address our most pressing existential challenge – climate change,” Norman said.

Under current policies New Zealand was on track to increase net emissions by 20 per cent from 2005 to 2030, according to Government projections.

“The Finance Minister talked about Covid-19 being a one-in-a-hundred-year threat, but climate change is the threat that will decide if we have another hundred years on this planet.”

Norman added there was little in today’s Budget to make industrial farming more sustainable – and there also appeared to be nothing to support the rollout of household solar panels and batteries, which the grid operator Transpower had identified as key to decarbonising the energy system.